DVD burn out ... I need a better work flow

For years I have produced video using Final Cut Pro and then when it went to ver. 10 I had to jump ship as that was just a joke. Never looking back I went to Adobe and I was ok because I had Encore CS to make so-so final dvd's.

I have been chasing the ever so elusive sharpness and maximum time fairy and never seem to catch it. So many times after long renders the DVD DL would look a bit pixelated as I dumbed down my HD to SD camera footage. I shoot with simple 1080P Panasonics to SD cards, copy it to my main drive and open up Premier Pro CC or CS6 to start the editing with Encore chapter markers and 5" fade in and out titles (these are often dance videos for kids with 30-60 dances per show plus slide show and awards).

I have noticed recently that by not changing the incoming clips to match my chosen timeline of 720p 30fps and let it keep what it likes it seems to look sharper. In the end I shoot for the final 720p export as mentioned earlier but I render that in Encore CS to a DL DVD. I realize that I am not giving the best information but I need to get to a wedding to take photos today and for me its the end of the school year and the videos are happening very soon with very short deadlines.

So to get to the point I noticed that a local guy puts out a pretty good DVD (with 3.5 hours of show on a SINGLE LAYER DVD) that was apparently burned or even created / compressed with Roxio Toast. The files are identified with this info: Roxio Video Player Document and they are .vob files like mine in the final file to DVD respect.

I am looking at Sony Vegas and DVD Architecture but I am so used to my Adobe stuff that I really didn't to change. What he gets on a single layer it takes me a double layer to do and I never push more than 1.5 hours per single layer dvd equivalent. So I do my best to give what I thought was the best and here is a guy with some trick that works that I don't know about doing things for half of the amount of DVDs needed and with good sharpness and no interpolation lines that I can see.